Category: Sports News

Welcome to our series grading every member of the San Diego Padres’ 40-man roster. The roster being evaluated is current as of Oct. 18, prior to the end of the World Series. Because of that, it will include players who will be free agents once the postseason concludes. Each player will be graded on their performance in the 2026 season, including the playoffs. That performance will be weighted based on how much time the player spent with the team (availability is the best ability). 

A Starter in Waiting

Jhony Brito dominated in the minors this season. Between three different levels of the Padres’ minor-league system, Brito had his best season since being traded to the Friars. He came over as a kicker in the deal that sent Juan Soto to the New York Yankees. Brito was somewhat of an afterthought and hasn’t done much in San Diego since. He’s thrown a total of 52 2/3 innings for the big-league club.

Overall Grade: C-

Despite his incredible success in the minor leagues (2.97 ERA, 69.2 IP), Brito didn’t do much in the majors this year. In nine innings out of the bullpen, the right-hander posted a 3.00 ERA despite a minuscule 0.89 WHIP. Brito couldn’t limit hard contact, allowing two homers in that short stint with the big-league club. He likely would have been called up to the majors sooner, but the San Diego ‘pen is too deep.

Brito could figure into the Padres’ starting rotation plans for the 2026 season if he can prove himself in Spring Training. Brito had below-average marks in both WHIP (1.21) and strikeouts (46, 69.2 IP). The righty didn’t pitch very deep into games (3.2 IP on average), however some of that could be due to the nature of pitching in the minor leagues.

The right-hander missed the majority of the 2025 season after a UCL internal brace procedure in his throwing elbow. Brito posted resurgent numbers after returning from that surgery. If he can keep that up in 2027, he could legitimately work his way onto the Padres’ pitching staff. Regardless, he pitched quite well in 2026 but will need to produce more consistent results in order to make an impact with the big-league club.

LOS ANGELES – The same night the Los Angeles Dodgers were swept out of the NLCS by the Milwaukee Brewers, owner Mark Walter asked president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and general manager Brandon Gomes about their thoughts for the offseason.

Despite the ongoing federal investigations into Guggeinheim's majority partner that has led to the sale of several of Walter's pro sports franchises such as the Los Angeles Lakers and Chelsea FC, Friedman said the directive he's gotten has been "business as usual." If there are plans for a sale, he hasn't heard anything about it. He's also gotten no indication that the Dodgers will have any less financial resources than normal.

"So much of his focus was, 'How do we put ourselves in the best position to win in '27?'" Friedman said during his exit interview at Dodger Stadium on Wednesday, Oct. 21.

Prepping for World Series run in 2027

How exactly they'll be able to do that, however, is another unknown in an offseason full of uncertainty for the back-to-back World Series champions. There is, after all, a pending lockout that feels inevitable as MLB owners and the players union don't appear to be getting any closer to agreeing to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement.

If the owners are successful in their steadfast push to implement a salary cap, that would have a substantial effect on how the Dodgers could add to a roster that has eight pending free agents. For now, though, Friedman's approach isn't changing until the current CBA expires in December.

"We're just hard at work trying to figure out the best way to put together our roster," he said. "Those are things that we're not involved in and depending on how things play out, we'll adjust to whatever the rules are."

What are Dodgers' plans for to-be free agent Tarik Skubal?

The biggest name set to hit free agency is starting pitcher Tarik Skubal, who looked like a luxury when the Dodgers traded for him at the deadline but eventually became a much-needed steady presence in the rotation. The back-to-back AL Cy Young winner is projected to become one of the highest-paid pitchers of all time once he hits the open market. That might be a price even the Dodgers might not be willing to reach.

Friedman was noncommittal about bringing Skubal back, applauding the impact he had on the mound and in the clubhouse after moving cities midseason but also "wishing him nothing but the best" moving forward. It's worth noting that Friedman does expect to get at least one pitcher back in 2027: Shohei Ohtani, who will not need surgery on his knee or bicep injuries and could possibly be ready to go by spring.

Dodgers must deal with aging roster

As for other areas of the roster, Friedman did address the dinosaur in the room.

The Dodgers had the oldest lineup in the big leagues this season at an average age of 30.9 years old, according to Baseball Reference. Almost all of their core players are on the other side of 30. 2024 World Series MVP Freddie Freeman is 36 and entering the final year of the six-year $162 million deal he signed with LA in 2022. Mookie Betts (33) and Ohtani (32) are under contract for much longer, but they're not getting any younger, either. In fact, the only regular fixtures in LA's lineup under 30 years old this season were Kyle Tucker (29) and Andy Pages (25).

That might have been a factor in why the Dodgers have fallen off offensively in the second half of the season each of the last two years, to which Friedman admitted that he might have to be more proactive with getting guys rest once they get into the dog days.

Is help on the way from Dodgers' farm system?

But age isn't too much of a concern for Friedman, who pointed to the Dodgers' No. 1-ranked farm system according to MLB Pipeline. For him, the key is supplementing his veteran core with young guys and transitioning them gradually into more responsibility.

Therein lies another question: Where does Josue De Paula fit on this team next year?

The 21-year-old top prospect made such an impression in two weeks in September that he cracked the NLDS and NLCS rosters as a lefty bat off the bench. His bat is clearly ready for the major leagues, and his presence seems to be a spark for the Dodgers veteran offense. Still, Friedman and Gomes made it clear that he needs to take a leap forward as an outfielder.

"We've all seen what he's capable of in the box, which is incredibly exciting," Gomes said. "With that being said, we already have a very talented core group already here. So, it's finding those opportunities but also making sure that throughout this offseason and coming into spring that he continues to improve and gets to that bar and gets to be an above average defender."

Including De Paula, the Dodgers carry six prospects who are ranked in MLB Pipeline's Top 100: outfielders De Paula (No. 4), Eduardo Quintero (No. 15), Mike Sirota (No. 17), shortstop Emil Morales (No. 22), right-handed pitcher Christian Zazueta (No. 33) and outfielder Charles Davalan (No. 79).

There's some sorting around the front office will have to do, but this wave of young talent is what keeps Friedman hopeful that the Dodgers will be able to avoid "falling off a cliff" the way most veteran teams eventually do.

"That is why we have poured so much energy and focus into our farm system," he said. "... We couldn't feel more bullish on the position player core group, from A ball through Triple-A that are coming, and obviously we've traded away a lot of really talented players also.

"... We feel really good about our future outlook."

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: What’s next for Dodgers? Andrew Friedman addresses Skubal, De Paula, roster

Dodger Stadium was eerily quiet on Wednesday, as a light rain fell over the already yellowing grass. A crow perched on an empty seat. Scattered lights flickered in mostly dark hallways.

Before the World Series begins, the stadium was closed for the season, hosting just one last event before officially wrapping up the 2026 slate.

In the interview room, tucked away at the entrance to the clubhouse, president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman and general manager Brandon Gomes took their seats at the podium for their end-of-season press conference.

There was the usual end-of-season question checklist: Are you expecting any changes to the coaching staff or front office? “I expect status quo,” Friedman said. Is Shohei Ohtani going to undergo offseason surgery? “That’s not on the table,” Friedman said.

Read more:Plaschke: Enough is enough. The Dodgers must stop letting Shohei Ohtani pitch

But from that emerged a persistent through line.

The Dodgers had fallen short of their goal of a three-peat. But considering the age of the position-player core, the scrutiny owner Mark Walter is under, and MLB owners’ insistence on a salary cap in their early collective bargaining agreement proposals, was the Dodgers’ dynasty over?

“I welcome it,” Friedman said of such claims. “For us, and we’ve talked about this a lot, even after successes and we winning a World Series and then winning back to back, everything we do is for our fans. And there’s a lot of noise around us in general. We don’t really pay much attention to it. It’s a partnership we feel with our fans, and so people saying that we’re done and we’re on the downside of this run — it’s just more noise to us because everything for us is about the motivation we have to have a parade in the streets of Los Angeles next November.”

Friedman also didn’t seem to anticipate any trickle down from Walter’s outside ventures — Walter’s insurance companies are under federal investigation and face several lawsuits — affecting the Dodgers’ offseason budget.

“It’s been business as usual for us,” Friedman said. “We talked to Mark after we lost, and he was obviously really disappointed. But so much of his focus was on, ‘OK, what can we do? What are our plans? What are our thoughts for the offseason?’ And our brains weren’t quite there yet, but so much of his focus was, how do we put ourselves in the best position to win in ‘27?”

How will the Dodgers go about picking themselves up from their NLCS exit?

The Dodgers’ 2026 season wasn’t exactly a failure. They won 100 games in the regular season and lost in the playoffs to the only team that won more than that — the Brewers. But the Dodgers, with their star power and payroll, aren’t in the business of accepting moral victories.

Though plenty went wrong in the postseason, from Ohtani’s struggles following his injured list stint, to stalwart Yoshinobu Yamamoto’s surprisingly short start in Game 2 of the NLCS, the overarching theme in the Dodgers’ four straight losses to the Brewers was a lack of offensive execution, especially with runners in scoring position.

“Obviously throughout the latter part of the year, it was stuff we were talking about and trying to put our finger on,” Friedman said of the offense. “And in a lot of ways, it’s a little bit of a game of whack-a-mole, where it can be one thing for some period of time, and then it’s something else, and then it’s something else. Sometimes it’s noise, and sometimes it’s real. And what’s important for us is to be able to sift out the noise and isolate what’s real and what things we can improve upon. We’ll spend a lot of time really focusing on that in the off season.”

Read more:Why impending free agent Tarik Skubal doesn't believe it's the end of an era for the Dodgers

Asked if the age of the lineup could be a contributing factor, Friedman pointed to the strong finishes of some of the more veteran players on the roster.

“I don’t think it’s as easy as to paint it with that broad of a stroke,” he said.

Friedman, in an effort to continue to extend the Dodgers’ run of success, has kept in mind the cliff that successful veteran teams can fall off of, if the roster isn’t properly backfilled.

“This isn’t something that we just woke up and were like, ‘Oh wow, the age of our position player group,’” Friedman said. “We knew what things were going to look like in ‘26, ‘27, but also how talented these guys are, the way they prepare. And so much of our long-term contract bats are betting on the human — betting on the person, betting on the work ethic, betting on them doing everything they can to keep themselves in the best position to have success. But when you couple the core talent that we have at the major league level with the position-player strengths that we have in our farm system, that’s what makes us excited, is the art of how to onboard some of these young, talented minor league players.”

The Dodgers had the No. 1 ranked farm system as of mid-August, according to MLB Pipeline. But many of those prospects, including the three outfielders who were the Dodgers’ top three (Josue De Paula, Eduardo Quintero and Mike Sirota), are blocked by veteran players.

“For us, it’s just about having as many talented players as we can, and things tend to sort themselves out,” Friedman said.

This offseason, the Dodgers will also have to figure out what to do about their soon-to-be free agents, a group headlined by left-hander Tarik Skubal. The two-time Cy Young winner was not only the best pitcher available on the trade market when the Dodgers acquired him from the Tigers at the trade deadline, but he’s in line to be the best pitcher available this offseason as well.

“It’s not easy for a guy to get traded in the middle of a season to come to a new city, new clubhouse,” Friedman said. “You have set routines, and you have to make those adjustments. It’s not easy. The way he was able to seamlessly transition, not just in terms of on the field, but in the clubhouse, I can’t say enough good things about the impact that he made in such a short period of time.

Read more:Dodgers catcher Dalton Rushing to undergo elbow surgery for partial UCL tear

“We have a tremendous amount of respect for him on and off the field. … He’s put himself in this position to go out and be a free agent. And for us, it’s, continue to talk to [Scott Boras, Skubal’s agent]. But he and his family have to make a choice over where they want to spend the next X number of years, and obviously we wish him nothing but the best.”

When asked about negotiations, however, Friedman spoke generally, saying the Dodgers were still “wrapping [their] arms around” their offseason strategy.

The impending lockout, which is expected to go into effect on Dec. 1 as soon as the current CBA expires, and uncertainty over changes in the next CBA, will certainly affect the free-agent and trade markets this offseason. And though MLB navigated a lockout just five years ago, the owners’ push for a salary cap has many around the industry bracing for a longer work stoppage and murkier landscape on the other side.

“I never have any feel for how a market’s going to play out,” Friedman said. “We’ve kidded ourselves in the past that, like, ‘Hey, we think this is going to happen,’ and it just takes on its own life form. So for us, it’s just about being as prepared as we possibly can be, and pouncing on opportunities.”

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This story originally appeared in Los Angeles Times.

There’s a new name being bandied about for the Mariners manager position; The Athletic reports that, in addition to known quantities Joe Espada and Rocco Baldelli, the Mariners are also interviewing 36-year-old Jason Kanzler, currently director of player development for the Cubs.

Kanzler has a background as a player: he was drafted by the Twins in 2013 out of SUNY Buffalo and spent three years as an outfielder in Minnesota’s system, topping out at the High-A level. After being released in 2015, he taught public school for a few years while building his own performance training business, coaching Cape Cod League baseball in the summers, before transitioning to coaching full-time. Eventually he landed in the Astros system, where he worked his way up from a minor-league hitting coordinator in 2019 to the World Series champion big-league club in 2022 (putting him solidly past the most scandal-soaked years of the Astros, although it was a near miss with the Brandon Taubman debacle). The Cubs hired Kanzler as director of player development prior to the 2024 season, a role that is currently overseen by Justin Toole in the Mariners organization but most Mariners fans might associate with Andy McKay, who held the position for seven years before the Mariners promoted him to assistant GM in 2022; McKay moved to the Guardians prior to the 2026 season to take an on-field role.

It’s more relevant to talk about Toole and McKay as analogues for Kanzler than it is to talk about Baldelli or Espada, both of whom have years of experience managing at the big-league level. Kanzler’s background is more on the minor-league and independent side, with some of the hallmarks you find in people who are more invested on the player development side. Kanzler has a Twitter account (@KanzlerThinks) that hasn’t been updated since 2020, shortly after he began his big-league coaching career in earnest, which hits many of the same beats you’ll find in skimming Twitter feeds from other young coaches – he rails about the youth sports industrial complex (yes!), says the best training equipment is A Hill (eyeroll), and rewrites the lyrics to “The Sound of Silence” to be about hitting development (?) on a post dated on Christmas Day 2019 (???). A peek at Kanzler’s LinkedIn touts his “proficiency” in Spanish, which is certainly preferable to not proficient, and a “broad coding background” (his Twitter bio identifies him as a “hobbyist programmer”), suggesting he’s at least not adverse to integrating technology.

Kanzler was hired to oversee Cubs player development at a time when the Cubs had the most MLB Pipeline Top 100 prospects in baseball (7) – interestingly, he told MLB.com shortly after his hiring that he actually felt the strength of the farm was a challenge, noting that the big-league club – which had just added Pete Crow-Armstrong – was set up to be competitive for several years, meaning the farm would be depleted by trades, and emphasizing the importance of making sure the farm was deep and robust in order to weather those trades. That’s a similar situation to what Kanzler, should he become the Mariners manager, would be walking into in Seattle. The Mariners started the season with seven top-100 prospects, but have already promoted four of them – Colt Emerson, Kade Anderson, Lazaro Montes, and Michael Arroyo – to the big leagues, triggering a new contention cycle but also resetting the next wave of prospects on the farm. Kanzler, over his time with the Cubs, would be familiar with both managing the farm and seeing how that wave of young players integrate with the existing big-league clubhouse, making him uniquely positioned to understand where the Mariners are headed into 2027.

The question, of course, is if Kanzler has enough experience on the big-league side of things to translate those learnings into success for the Mariners. Kanzler was 34 when he joined the Cubs, two years younger than Justin Toole was when he took up the same position with the Mariners; at 36, he’s almost ten years younger than Baldelli, 15 years younger than Espada, and over 20 years younger than the Mariners’ last skipper, Dan Wilson.

But age doesn’t determine personality; yesterday I wrote about how the new Mariners manager must be able to empower a clubhouse culture of leadership and accountability. Espada, for all his years of experience, inherited a clubhouse that Astros beat writer Chandler Rome, on 710 Seattle Sports’s Bump and Stacy show, described as “self-policing.” Whoever is given the Mariners managerial position will have significantly more work to do in building clubhouse culture, and Kanzler’s youthful energy – even if some of it comes off as sparkle-motion-level cringe-y – could be a spark in invigorating a clubhouse that often felt stagnant and directionless. Plus, we already know his potential clubhouse leader Cal Raleigh is no stranger to a parody song himself.

Shohei Ohtani avoided surgery after his injury-plagued 2026 season.

Dodgers backup catcher Dalton Rushing, however, wasn’t so lucky.

Rushing was set to undergo an internal brace procedure on Wednesday to address the damaged ligament in his right throwing elbow, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the situation.

The operation will come with a nine-month timeline to return to full catching duties, as the Los Angeles Times first reported, but the expectation is that he could be ready as a hitter by the beginning of next season.

Rushing initially hurt his elbow at the beginning of August, while playing catch in the outfield before the start of a game. He spent much of the final two months of the regular season on the injured list, returning for only six days in early September before going down again when he suffered a setback in his throwing progression.

Rushing was healthy enough to be activated for hitting-only duties during the final week of the regular season. However, he did not make the team’s postseason roster, bypassed by rookie sensation Josue De Paula as the team’s left-handed bench bat in October.

Now, more uncertainty awaits Rushing, who is two years removed from his debut as one of the club’s top prospects.

For all the strides he took in his second MLB campaign –– batting .246 with 12 home runs and 36 RBIs in 80 games, including an extended stint in June and July as the fill-in starter behind the plate during Will Smith’s neck injury –– his place in the team’s long-term plans remains unclear.

Rushing’s surgery likely opens a pathway for Hunter Feduccia to begin next season in the backup catcher role, where he impressed as Rushing’s replacement down the stretch this year.

Where Rushing will fit into the early-season roster is unknown.

Though he could still offer an option off the bench with his bat, there might be few opportunities for regular playing time with Shohei Ohtani entrenched as the designated hitter and Freddie Freeman at first base.

It’s all just another setback for the 25-year-old slugger, who has yet to truly flourish at the big-league level.